LoRaWAN NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 1.

Introduction
Now is the era of connected objects. IoT (Internet of Things) is gaining much importance
in almost every field such as business, industry, consumer electronics, automotive and much more.
Every object in today’s world is well connected to each other in one way or the other. We can control
the lights and equipment in our homes sitting in our office. In industries and other fields activities are
regulated and controlled from a remote location. Controlling street lights from a remote distance, smart
food order system, etc., is no longer a dream. Gone are the days where the presence of the person on the
spot was necessary for the monitoring and control. Technology has advanced to an extend where
everything can be made possible sitting in your house or in your office cubicle. IoT plays a major role in
this. IoT connects various objects such as sensors, actuators, electronics and network connectivity that
enable the objects to exchange data between them and stay connected. It is a network of physical
objects. According to Machina Research, connected objects will account for more than 25 billion
connections by 2025 [3]. At present 16 billion objects are connected by IoT with industries, smart cities
and smart homes contributing the highest number. A large number of objects are connected by
technologies such as GSM, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. But in all these power requirement and
battery life is a major issue. Most of the applications in today’s world are embedded systems. These
systems have very high power constrains as most of this system are battery operated and not externally
powered.
LoRa (Long Range) is a new wireless IoT connectivity family that has recently evolved and
is gaining popularity in low powered battery operated embedded systems that need to transfer small
amount of data at short intervals over long range [1].

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Chapter 2.

COMPARISION OF LoRa WITH VARIOUS EXSISTING TECHNOLOGIES

There are numerous technologies in today’s world that is used in IoT

applications. Every technology has its own features, merits and demerits. One technology cannot serve
all the applications of IoT. Different applications will have different requirements. No technology can be
said as the best technology. Each technology differs from other in different aspects. Applications also
differ from each other in their requirements and their usage. Based on the requirement we can only
choose a technology that is best suited for the specific application from the existing technologies. Wi-Fi
is the most popular technology that has been recently evolved and is used in long distance
communications. We have Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc., for short distance as well and these can and are being
used in various IoT applications. But in all of this battery is a major concern. LoRa enables secure bi-
directional, low cost and mobile communication for IoT, smart city, machine to machine (M2M) and
industrial applications. LoRa or LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) is a generic term for agroup of
technology for wide area communication. LoRa is rapidly gaining high popularity and is a preferred
technology for IoT embedded systems because of its Long Range, high capacity of nodes in network,
long battery life, bi-directional, secured and efficient network, interference immunity.

A. LoRa versus Cellular Network –

The traditional cellular network consisting of GSM, 2G, 3G, 4G are very popular
and widespread. These are one of the well-established networks. But these were traditionally built for
high data throughput and so these do not optimise the power consumption. These technologies consume
too much power and are not a good option when small amount of data is to be transmitted less frequently.
The total cost of ownership is also very high. With the advent of the 5G technology many of the cellular
providers are discontinuing 2G services orphaning the IoT devices running. The LoRa technology on the
other hand comes with a lower power consumption rate and is very much suitable were small amount of
data is to be transmitted over long distances.

B. LoRa versus LAN –

LAN or Local Area Network is a widely adopted standard. It is used within a
limited area such as in buildings, schools, office, laboratories etc. LAN can be wired or wireless. Ethernet
and Wi-Fi is the commonly used technologies in LAN. The wireless technology used in LAN is the Wi-
Fi. Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity. They provide a wireless link for communication. The Wi-Fi is
usually confined within a small area such as a building, home office. It can span over a limited range that
is 1 km in radius. But Lora technology provides a long range. A single LoRa gateway can span an area of
100 km2 . The quality of service of Wi-Fi is poor. The Wi-Fi is always flooded with huge number of data
and is difficult to distinguish between the data and many a time data is not received by the correct
receiver. The LoRa technology in other hand has reasonable quality of service. Wi-Fi is wireless and so

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the security is low. Anybody can interfere with the data during transmission. It was a very poor
encryption and cannot be regarded as secure. On the other hand, the LoRa offers double AES encryption.
The security of LoRa is very high. The LoRa is based on chirp spread spectrum (CSS) which is highly
resistant to multipath and fading.

C. LoRa versus ZigBee –

ZigBee is based on high level communication protocol used to create personal
area networks. It consists of small low power digital radios. These are best suited for small scale projects
that need to transfer data over small distances. Its range is 10 -100 meters. These are based on mesh
networks that transmit data over long distances by transmitting data to many intermediate devices. This
consumes power and thus is not suitable for applications with low power requirements. LoRa on the other
hand is based on star topology that eliminates the transmission of data to intermediate devices thus
decreasing the power expenditure to a great extent. Also mesh networks are suitable for short to medium
range communications and do not have the long-range capability of LoRa technology.

D. LoRa versus NB-IoT –

NB-IoT stands for narrow band IoT. Both NB-IoT and LoRa are emerging
technologies and are of great importance. As every technology both of them have their own advantage
and disadvantage. Both of them are suited for different applications based on their features. The LoRa
technology is based on ALOHA and is asynchronous while the NB-IoT is based on FDMA. It needs
infrequent synchronization which leads to higher battery consumption than the LoRa technology. But the
latency and the data rate of NB-IoT is good contrary to LoRa. So those applications that require high
latency and need high data rate can use NB-IoT while the ones with lower data rate requirement can
choose LoRa. LoRa technology is most suited for IoT industry while the NB-IoT is suited for IoT
personal and IoT public.

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Fig: Comparison Of LoRawan Network Technology

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Chapter 3
Literature Review

Sr Title of the Paper Observation Scope

.
No
It is a preferred and most
 This paper discuses
suited technology for the
about the advantages of
IoT applications that
LoRa over the existing
Shilpa Devalal, A. Karthikeyan “LoRa need to communicate a
technologies used in
technology-an overview” roceedings of long distance and in
IoT.
the 2nd International conference on which the battery lifetime
 It also discusses the
Electronics, Communication and and power consumption
1 Aerospace Technology (ICECA 2018) features of LoRa. is a major limitation.
LoRaWAN (Long
IEEE Conference Record # 42487; LoRa technology also
Range Wide Area
IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-0965-1 offers high security. It is
Network) is an open expected that by 2024 3.6
grade secure standard billion LPWA
for the IoT connections will be
connectivity. established.
 A point-by-point LoRa In order to wrap up the
architecture is proposed study, at the final part, a
to be implemented in potential application for
the grid-feeding control LoRa enabled smart
structure of smartinverters for control,
inverters. Thismanagement, and
architecture iscoordination of remote
Orange Connected Objects & experimentallyevaluate residential MGs when the
Partnerships, LoRa Device Developer d in terms of latency components are spread
Guide, April 2016. analysis and externally over a wide area has been
2 https://partner.orange.com/wp-content/ generated power proposed and explained.
uploads/2016/04/LoRa-Device- setpoint, following Future works are
Developer-Guide-Orange.pdf smart inverters inrequired to
different LoRa settings. experimentally
The results demonstrate implement and evaluate
the effectiveness of the the described structure,
proposed LoRa which is planned to be
architecture, while the conducted by the authors.
settings are optimally
configured.
3 Umber Noreen, Ahcene Bounceur,  This paper focuses on Various LPWAN
Laurent Clavier “A Study of LoRa Low the emerging technologies are
Power and Wide Area Network currently contending to

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transmission gain an edge over the

technologies dedicated competition and provide
Technology”3rd International to IoT networks. the massive connectivity
Conference on Advanced Technologies Characteristics of LoRa that will be required by
for Signal and Image Processing - are based on three basic the world in which
ATSIP'2017, May 22-24, 2017, Fez, parameters: Code Rate everyday objects are
Morroco. (CR), Spreading Factor expected to be connected
(SF) and Bandwidth through wireless network
(BW). This paper in order to communicate
provides in depth with each other. This
analysis of the impact paper focused on one of
of these three the most prominent
parameters on the data LPWAN technology:
rate and time on air LoRaTM.
Since the focus of this
 This paper devises a paper is assessing the
new paradigm for performance of LoRa-
modeling LoRa LPWAN in a wide
modulation variety of scenarios
performance that inspecting either/both
incorporates the joint inter-system and intra-
impact of SNR and SIR system interference. As
Minar El-Aasser , Phoebe Edward,
in order to represent the future work, we intend to
Mohamed Mandour, Mohamed Ashour,
intra-system analyze LoRa modulation
Tallal Elshabrawy “A comprehensive
interference behavior numerically considering
4 hybrid bit-level and packet-level LoRa-
during LoRAWAN collisions between
LPWAN simulation model” German
operation. packets of different SFs.
University in Cairo, El Tagamoa El
 . The proposed Moreover, we shall
Khames, New Cairo City, Egypt
simulation framework modify and extended the
has the potential to proposed simulator to
support high accuracy measure the impact of
of error performance inter-SF collisions and
prediction in a realistic fading. This in turn will
LoRa-LPWAN contribute to more
deployment. accurate modelling of
LoRa-LPWAN.
5 Alireza Zourmand , Andrew Lai Kun  In this paper, the actual In this paper, the
Hing , Chan Wai Hung , Mohammad deployment of IoT performance and
AbdulRehman “Internet of Things (IoT) system using LoRa coverage result of the
using LoRa technology” 2019 IEEE technology with the LoRa indoor and outdoor
International Conference on Automatic combination of Wi-Fi deployment is presented
Control and Intelligent Systems technology. Besides, using a selected
(I2CACIS 2019), 29 June 2019, this paper presents the combination of
Selangor, Malaysia performance and the Spreading Factor and

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actual coverage area of Bandwidth setting.

the LoRa network in
both the indoor and
outdoor condition.

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Chapter 4

LoRaWAN Network Architecture

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4.1 LoRaWAN Network Architecture Description

LoRa is a physical layer that provides a long-range communication link. This has been
standardized and extended by adding a MAC layer LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) to it.
This defines the network architecture and communication protocol. LoRaWAN specification is
standardized and open sourced by the LoRa alliance. Most of the existing technologies are based on
mesh network. In the mesh network the infrastructure node is LoRa is a physical layer that provides a
long-range communication link. This has been standardized and extended by adding a MAC layer
LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) to it. This defines the network architecture and
communication protocol. LoRaWAN specification is standardized and open sourced by the LoRa
alliance. Most of the existing technologies are based on mesh network. In the mesh network the
infrastructure node isconnected to as many nodes as possible and cooperates with one another to route
the data. In the mesh network each node receives and forward data from other node that might be
irrelevant for it. This increases the range to a great deal but also adds complexity and decreases the
battery life. On the other hand, in the star topology the bridge or switches are directly connected to a
small subset of bridge or switches deceasing complexity of the network. These provide a hierarchical
infrastructure. LoRaWAN is based on star topology. They decrease the power consumption and battery
life to a great extend in comparison with the conventional mesh network.

The LoRa network consist of four basic elements

 The LoRa node or End Points
 The Gateway
 The Network Server
 Application Server

A. The LoRa Node or End Points - The end points or LoRa nodes comprises sensors or application
where sensing and control takes place such as sensors, tracking devices, etc., [1] [4]. This is the heart of
an embedded system. These include water meter, smoke alarm, gas monitoring and such applications.

B. The Gateway -The gateway comprises the net element of the LoRa network. There are a number of
gateways [1] [4]. Each gateway is connected to every end node. The data transmitted by the node is sent
to all the gateways and each gateway which receives a signal transmits it to a cloud based network server
via cellular, Ethernet, satellite, or Wi-Fi. The gateway can be micro gateway or pico gateway. Micro
gateways are used in public network to give city or nationwide coverage while the Pico gateway is used
in hard to reach dense areas to improve the quality of service and network capacity. Micro gateway gives
high coverage. Both Omni-directional and multi-sector antennas are used in LoRa base station.

C. The Network Server - The network server has all the intelligence. The data received from different

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gateways is filtered, security checks, adaptive data rates etc., are performed and acknowledgement is sent
to the gateways [1] [4]. The network server is the one who identifies whether the data received is intended
for any application server and is thus sent to the intended application server via some backhaul.

D. The Application Server - They receive the intended data from the network server.
Chapter 5.
LoRa FEATURES

A. Long Range of Lora - As the name implies LoRa is a long-range protocol. It is capable of
transmitting data over long distances. A single gateway can cover hundred-kilometer square of area. The
long range of the LoRa technology is due to its link budget and the chirp spread spectrum modulation
that it employs.
1) Chirp spread spectrum: LoRa employs chirp spread spectrum modulation technique. This technique is
being used in military and space communication for over decades due to its robust nature and long-range
capacity. It is now being used commercially in LoRa communication. It also provides immunity to
multipath and fading. The chirp spread spectrum has a low transmission power requirement. Chirp is a
signal whose frequency increases or decreases over time. Thus, a chirp signal can be up-chirp and down-
chip. In the chirp spread spectrum modulation the wanted data signal is multiplied with the chirp signal
[2]. This spreads the bandwidth beyond the bandwidth of the original data signal. At the receiver end the
received signal is re-multiplies with the locally generated copy of the chirp signal. this compresses the
modulated signal back to the original bandwidth. This reduces the noise and interference. The LoRa
modulation bit rate can be expressed as Rb = SF * bit/sec (1) Rb: Bit Rate SF: Spreading Factor BW:
Bandwidth The increase in the signal bandwidth gives the error free data that is transmitted over long
distance. This can be visualized by comparing the sensitivity of the LoRa modulated signal to the
frequency shift key modulated signal. The sensitivity of the chirp spread spectrum modulated signal is
much higher than that of frequency shift key modulation.
2) Link Budget: The LoRa technology has a link budget greater than any other existing technologies.
Link budget accounts for its long range to a great extent. Link budget is an accounting of all the gains
and losses in a transmission system. The link budget of a network can be expressed as PRX(dBm) =
PTX(dBm) + GSYSTEM(dB) - LSYSTEM(dB) - LCHANNEL(dB) - M(dB) (2) where, PRX(dBm):
received power PTX(dBm): transmitted power GSYSTEM(dB): system gains such as those associated
with directional antennas, etc. LSYSTEM: losses associated with the system such as feed-lines, antennas
etc. LCHANNEL: losses due to the propagation channel M: fading margin The link budget is the power
that is received at the receiver side. The link budget of LoRa is high that in turn accounts for its high
sensitivity. Most of the technologies used for connectivity in IoT uses frequency shift key (FSK)
modulation. When the data rate of LoRa signal is equivalent to four times the data rate of the frequency
shift key (FSK) signal the LoRa signal offers the similar or equal sensitivity. Thus, LoRa can cover more
distance than any other technique.

B. Battery lifetime - The most important criteria of an embedded device is its battery lifetime. Most of
the embedded devices need to communicate with other devices near or far. This consumes high power.
The embedded devices are all mostly battery operated. Thus, the essential requirement of these

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embedded devices is its battery lifetime. Most of the protocols or techniques used to create IoT
embedded device now-a-days consumes very high power thus reducing the battery lifetime. LoRa
optimizes the battery consumption in a device and is most suited for battery operated embedded device.
LoRa consumes the least power when compared to all the existing technologies. The low battery
consumption in a LoRa networks accounts to the asynchronous communication of the nodes in the
network. In a LoRa network the nodes communicates only when they have any data to send whether
energy driven or scheduled. They adopt the ALOHA method. In ALOHA method frame is send only
when there is any data to send otherwise no transmission takes place. If the frame is received
successfully another frame is sent or the same frame is retransmitted. The ALOHA method saves battery
lifetime because the network is doing transmission when there is any data. It does not do any
transmission otherwise. Also, most of the other technologies are of mesh network or adopt synchronous
communication in which the nodes have to wake up and synchronize time to time. This consumes more
energy. In a recent study it was shown that the LoRa technology is 4 to 5 times better than any other
existing technology.

C. Network Capacity - Star network is used in Lora network. The LoRa network gateway receives data
from large number of nodes. For this the gateway must have high capacity. This is achieved by adaptive
data rate and multichannel multi-modem transceiver at the gateway. Adaptive Data Rate (ADR) is a
mechanism for optimizing data rates, airtime and energy consumption in the network. Static nodes use
ADR (Adaptive Data Rate)[6]. Whether to use ADR or not is decided by the node itself. In ADR the
data rates of the node are managed by the network. When the node decides that it wants to use ADR it
sets the ADR bit to 1 in the uplink transmission. When the network gets the signal that the node wants to
use ADR it collects the signal to noise ratio, data rate, number of gateways that receive the data and
signal strength of the 20-recent transmission from the specific node. Based on this data the network
decides how much it can increase the data rate of decrease the transmission power. This reduces the air
time and optimizes the transmission power. We can also say that it helps in reduction of battery
consumption. This whole thing is done using the ADR algorithm. A node that is static at one time and
mobile at another. So, the ADR algorithm can also be used by a mobile node that is parked at a fixed
spot at the given time [13]. The multichannel multi-modem transceiver enables messages to be
simultaneously received from multiple gateways.

D. Security - AES encryption and IEEE 802.15.4/2006 Annex B is used in this technology for security
and authentication. While most technologies incorporate single layer security, LoRa network incorporate
two layers of security: network security and application security. The network security is used for
authenticating the node in the network while the application security protects the end user application
data from the network operator. The LoRa technology uses two keys for the security and authenticity:
NwkSKey (Network Session Key) and AppSKey (Application Session Key). For the end device to
participate in a network it must be activated and authenticated. The technology has two methods of
authentication and activation 1. Over the air activation (OAA) 2. Activation by personalisation (ABP) 1)
Over the air activation (OAA):In this type of end device activation, the device is not personalized with
any information. A join procedure is done for the end device to join any network. Before joining the
network, the end device is loaded with the information. This then has to be repeated for every

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transmission over the network when the session context information is lost. This method ensures that the
end devices is not confined to any particular service provider and can join any network service provider
while in roaming. 2) Activation by personalization (ABP):In this type of activation, the end device will
be already stored with the information needed for the activation. The device directly joins the specific
network defined in the information when the device is started. This type of personalization is not used
frequently and is used only under some specific cases. The commonly used personalization method is
the Over the Air Activation method. In ABP method simply a join request and join accept message is
sent between the end device and the network for the end device to activate. NetSKey and AppSKey must
be specific to every end device. Apart from being an activation method both the methods also provide
authenticity and security over the network.

E. Quality of Service ( QoS ) - Quality of service is the account of overall performance of a network. It
is based on various parameters such as data rate, immunity, throughput, packet loss, etc. The LoRa
technology which is based on chirp spread spectrum technology offers fairly good quality of service. It
is immune to interference, multipath and fading. In a wireless network, as the distance between the
devices increases the signal strength decreases. These are usually avoided by installing repeaters or by
having additional nodes as in mesh topology. But the cost of having more repeaters or nodes in between
is very high. But for LoRa, those signal with different sequence will be treated as noise at the network
coordinator. The nodes near the coordinator can transmit at a higher data rate and ones far away from the
coordinator can reduce the bandwidth.

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Chapter 6.
Limitations
LoRa like every technology has its own limitation too.
The limitations of LoRa are listed below:
 Only those applications that require low data rate (upto 27 Kbps) can use this.
 Limitations with the Duty Cycles in LoRa networks effectively limits the number of "messages" that
can be sent during a specific time frame.
 It is not suited for real time applications that require lower latency.

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Chapter 7.
Applications

 LoRa technology is developed for IoT applications.

 LoRa network can transfer small amount of data at intervals. So those applications that need to
transfer small amount of data can use LoRa technology.
 They are mostly used in vehicular to infrastructure applications.
 They also find application in smart meters, sensors, smart cities, streetlight controls, hospital
management, airport managements and a lot more provided these applications requires the
transfer of small amount of data at intervals.
 Those applications where the data rate is high such as audio and video the LoRa technology
cannot be used. But this technology can still be used in audio and video streaming where there is
a need for instructing the video to capture data etc.

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Chapter 8.
Conclusion

LoRa or LPWA is a very recent technology that has been evolved. In 2013 or before that, the term did not
even exist. Now the technology has developed and is being promoted and used worldwide because of its
various technical advantages. This technology compliments various other technologies such as cellular
network. As recently as in 2013 nobody thought that such a technology would exist. The LoRa
technology is preferred due to various advantages such as the battery lifetime, the long range, the security,
robustness to interferences and more. The technology is a package in itself. Various applications differ
from each other in its requirement and capabilities. Every application thus, cannot use the same
technology. The technology that an application uses depends on its requirement and other factors. And so
LoRa as such cannot serve every application out there. But it is a preferred and most suited technology for
the IoT applications that need to communicate a long distance and in which the battery lifetime and power
consumption is a major limitation. LoRa technology also offers high security. It is expected that by 2024
3.6 billion LPWA connections will be established.

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Chapter 9.
References

1. Shilpa Devalal, A. Karthikeyan “LoRa technology-an overview” roceedings of the 2nd

International conference on Electronics, Communication and Aerospace Technology (ICECA
2018) IEEE Conference Record # 42487; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-0965-1
2. Orange Connected Objects & Partnerships, LoRa Device Developer Guide, April 2016.
https://partner.orange.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/04/LoRa-Device-Developer-Guide-
Orange.pdf
3. Umber Noreen, Ahcene Bounceur, Laurent Clavier “A Study of LoRa Low Power and Wide Area
Network Technology”3rd International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Signal and
Image Processing - ATSIP'2017, May 22-24, 2017, Fez, Morroco.
4. Minar El-Aasser , Phoebe Edward, Mohamed Mandour, Mohamed Ashour, Tallal Elshabrawy “A
comprehensive hybrid bit-level and packet-level LoRa-LPWAN simulation model” German
University in Cairo, El Tagamoa El Khames, New Cairo City, Egypt
5. Alireza Zourmand , Andrew Lai Kun Hing , Chan Wai Hung , Mohammad AbdulRehman
“Internet of Things (IoT) using LoRa technology” 2019 IEEE International Conference on
Automatic Control and Intelligent Systems (I2CACIS 2019), 29 June 2019, Selangor, Malaysia

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